Unwitting Rape

This is a spin-off of a thread in this post. Content warning for rape. Probably not necessary or recommended reading for most readers.

Jessica Brown on evidence and luminosity

In "Thought Experiments, Intuitions, and Philosophical Evidence," Jessica Brown introduces a problem for "evidence neutrality" deriving from Williamson's anti-luminosity arguments: evidence neutrality implies that if S has E as evidence, it is always possible for S's community to know that E is evidence, which entails the false claim that evidence is luminous. Sounds ok. Then she writes this puzzling passage:

We might wonder whether we could overcome this first problem by weakening the content element of evidence neutrality. Instead of claiming that if p is part of a subject’s evidence, then her community can agree that p is evidence, the relevant condition could be weakened to the claim that her community can agree that p is true. Although this revised version of the evidence-neutrality principle avoids Williamson’s objection that one is not always in a position to know what one’s evidence is, it faces an objection from Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument. Williamson claims to have established that no nontrivial condition is luminous, where a condition is luminous if and only if for every case a, if in a C obtains, then in a one is in a position to know that C obtains (2000, 95). There is not space here to assess the success of Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument. However, assuming that it is successful, it seems that no mere tinkering with the content element of evidence neutrality will suffice to defend it.

I'm just not seeing the problem here. The proposal we're considering is this: any time S has E as evidence, S (and/or S's community) is in a position to know that E is true. But this does not imply that any non-trivial condition is luminous. The claim that evidence is luminous would need knowledge that E is evidence on the right-hand side; the claim that truth is luminous would need no restriction to evidence on the left-hand side. Saying that evidence requires being a position to know truth looks wholly consistent with Williamson's luminosity argument. Indeed, setting aside the role of the community -- which as far as I can tell is idle in the argument Brown is considering -- it follows trivially from Williamson's own view, E=K. Notice that S's knowing that p entails that S is in a position to know that p is true; this is no violation of anti-luminosity.
Anybody see what I'm missing?

The Rules of Thought: Philosophy and the a priori

I'm going to live up to the blogger stereotype and set a few posts on autofocus. The shameless project is to make the case that you might have good reason to read The Rules of Thought, the book that Benjamin Jarvis and I recently wrote. (OUP catalogue page) (my webpage)

I think that there are three possible hooks into our project. One of them -- the one that represented our own way into the project -- concerns the epistemology of the a priori in general, and the epistemology of philosophy in particular. Ben and I trace this interest pretty specifically to 2005, when, while PhD students at Brown, we took Joshua Schechter's seminar on the a priori, and also attended Timothy Williamson's Blackwell-Brown lectures, which eventually became The Philosophy of Philosophy. We were attracted by traditional idea that in many paradigmatic instances, philosophical investigation proceeded in some important sense independently from experience, but came to appreciate that (a) there were deep mysteries concerning the explanation for how this could be, and (b) there were strong challenges that suggested that the traditional idea couldn't be right. For example, the traditional idea has it that judgments about thought experiments constitute appreciate of facts that are both a priori and necessary; but Williamson gave what is now a somewhat famous argument that this can't be so: thought experiments don't include enough detail to entail the typical judgments. So the best they can support is something like a contingent, empirical counterfactual: if someone were in such-and-such circumstances, he would have JTB but no K, etc.

We wrote a defensive paper in response to Williamson's argument, explaining how one can understand the content of thought-experiment judgments in a way that renders them more plausibly necessary and a priori, invoking the notion of truth in fiction. ("Thought-Experiment Intuitions and Truth in Fiction" -- (draft) (published)) That paper did two useful things: it gave an objection to Wiliamson's treatment, and it defended a traditional aprioristic picture from Williamson's particular critique. But on the latter score, it was purely defensive; it did little to explain how a priori justification or knowledge was possible, or to articulate just what apriority could consist in. Another paper, "Rational Imagination and Modal Knowledge," (d) (p) gave a bit more epistemological background, and a focus on modal epistemology in particular. By the time of that paper, we were underway on the book.

What we needed, we realized, was a much fuller story about apriority, including detailed engagement with extant critiques of the notion. We give this in Part II of The Rules of Thought. Some of the critiques -- in particular, some of those from Williamson and Hawthorne, as well as some similar challenges from Yablo and Papineau -- show that a characterisation of apriority in terms of more psychological states like knowledge and justified belief is extremely difficult, perhaps impossible. (Here's a related blog post from last year.) Our general characterisation of the a priori is a negative one, given in terms of propositional justification. A subject has a priori propositional justification for p just in case she has justification for p, and this isn't due in constitutive part to any of the subject's experiences. We explain how this approach avoids the challenges to the a priori that are in the literature, and argue that there is strong reason to think that philosophical investigation is often a priori in our sense. The focus on propositional justification requires a fairly strong version of the traditional distinction between warranting and enabling roles for experience, which we attempt to explicate.

The negative characterisation is thin by design. We are explicitly open to a kind of pluralism about apriority, according to which various positive epistemic states can realise apriority. The state we focus on most is what we call 'rational necessity' -- certain contents are, we think, by their nature such that there is always conclusive reason to accept them. (Much more on this idea in another post on another motivation for the project.) But we allow that other states may realise apriority as well; we are open, for example, to the idea that it is a priori that perception is generally reliable, even though this isn't rationally necessary. Perhaps some kind of pragmatic explanation for these a priori propositions may be found.

In the context of our theory of the a priori, and our more detailed positive story about rational necessity, we rehearse the main ideas from our two previous papers on philosophical methodology: thought-experiment judgments, properly understood, often have contents that are rationally necessary, hence a priori; so likewise for many judgments in modal epistemology concerning what is metaphysically possible. This all happens in Part II of the book.

So that's the first hook for our book: understanding the a priori and the epistemology of philosophy. We tell a story that is able to vindicate a number of pretty traditional ideas about how philosophy works (but without problematic focus on words or concepts). The other two hooks will each get another post -- one concerning Fregean ideas about mental content, and one about the role of intuitions.

Fricker on concepts and states

Elizabeth Fricker writes:

Williamson maintains that 'knows' has no analysis 'of the standard kind'—this being one that factors knowing into a conjunction of mental and non-mental components, notably the mental state of (rational) belief plus truth and some other factors. Call this thesis NASK. If NASK were false, 'know' having an a priori necessary and sufficient condition in terms of belief plus some other (non-factive) mental and non-mental components, this would establish the falsity of KMS ['knowledge is a mental state']: knowing would be revealed a priori to be a conjunctive 'metaphysically hybrid' state.

I find the suggestion that there is any deep connection between NASK (a claim about the concept 'knows') and KMS (a claim about the nature of knowledge) somewhat confusing. She characterizes the denial of this connection as an 'error theory':

Here I follow Williamson in ruling out the possibility of an error theory—that our concept 'knows' could be complex, while it in fact denotes a simple state. It is doubtful whether this is even coherent, and it can surely be discounted.

I don't see why this would be an error theory, and I don't see why it should be thought incoherent (unless one is worried about the coherence of the very notion of a complex concept, as Fricker clearly is not). It's not true in general that there's any problem with the concept of 'X' having some property, while X itself has a contrary property. (The concept 'sky' has no colour, but the sky is blue.)

So what's going on?

Williamson on Apriority

Here's an argument with the conclusion that there's no deep difference between cats and dogs.

The Dogs and Cats Argument. Although a distinction between cats and dogs can be drawn, it turns out on closer examination to be a superficial one; it does not cut at the biological joints. Consider, for example, a paradigmatic cat, Felix. Felix has the following properties: (i) he has four legs, fur, and a tail; (ii) he eats canned food out of a bowl; (iii) humans like to stroke his back. Now consider a paradigmatic dog, Fido. Fido has all three of these properties as well. For instance, Fido also has four legs, and fur, and a tail, and when he eats, it is often served from a can into a bowl. And humans like to stroke Fido's back, too. In these respects, Fido and Felix are almost exactly similar. Therefore, there can't possibly be any deep biological distinction between them.

I'm sure you'll agree that the dogs and cats argument is terrible. Put a pin in that and consider another argument.

In his contribution to Al Casullo and Josh Thurow's forthcoming volume, The A Priori in Philosophy, Timothy Williamson argues against the theoretical significance of the distinction between the a priori and a posteriori. The thesis of the paper is that "although a distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge (or justification) can be drawn, it is a superficial one, of little theoretical interest."

It's a somewhat puzzling paper, I think, because it's not at all clear how it's broad argumentative strategy is supposed to support the conclusion. Williamson does not, for instance, articulate what he takes the apriority distinction to be, then argue that it is theoretically uninteresting. Instead, he identifies certain paradigms of a priori and a posteriori knowledge, then emphasizes various similarities between them. For example, he argues that the cognitive mechanisms underwriting certain a priori judgments are similar in various respects to those that underwrite certain a posteriori judgments. Then he spends most of the rest of the paper arguing that these are not idiosyncratic features of his particular examples. But why is this supposed to be relevant?

Williamson writes:

The problem is obvious. As characterized above, the cognitive processes underlying Norman's clearly a priori knowledge of (1) and his clearly a posteriori knowledge of (2) are almost exactly similar. If so, how can there be a deep epistemological difference between them?

But I do not find this problem at all obvious. The argument at least appears to have the structure of the terrible dogs and cats argument above. The thing to say about that argument is that identifying various similarities between two things does practically nothing to show that there aren't deep differences between them. There are deep biological distinctions between cats and dogs, but they're not ones that you can find by counting their legs or examining how humans interact with them. Similarly, Williamson offers nothing at all that I can see to rule out the possibility that there is a deep distinction between the a priori and a posteriori, but it is not one that is manifest in the cognitive mechanisms underwriting these judgments. For as Williamson himself later emphasizes, there's more to epistemology than cognitive mechanisms. If apriority lives in propositional justification—which is where I think it lives—then there's just no reason to expect it to show up at this psychological level. That doesn't mean it's not a deep distinction.

That Williamson's argument needs to be treated very carefully should also be evident from the fact that prima facie, it looks like it has enough teeth to show that the distinction between knowledge and false belief is not an epistemically deep one—a conclusion that everyone, but Williamson most of all, should reject. For the cognitive processes underlying cases of knowledge are often almost exactly similar to those underlying false beliefs. Should this tempt us to ask how, then, there could be a deep epistemological difference between them? I really don't see why.

E = K as foundationalism?

I'm re-reading Timothy Williamson's Knowledge and Its Limits for a reading group at UBC. I'm struck by this passage, from the introduction to Chapter 9 on Evidence.

[W]e may speculate that standard accounts of justification have failed to deal convincingly with the traditional problem the regress of justifications—what justifies the justifiers?—because they have forbidden themselves to use the concept knowledge. E = K suggests a very modest kind of foundationalism, on which all one's knowledge serves as the foundation for all one's justified beliefs.

I'm not at all sure what to make of this. I'm very impressed by E = K, but I have a hard time seeing reason to accept either of these claims:

1. E=K is a kind of foundationalism


2. E=K provides a solution to the traditional problem of the regress

Here's the story about foundationalism and the regress that I tell to my undergrads. I think it's pretty standard; if its somehow idiosyncratic, I hope someone will tell me. Everybody thinks that the justification for some beliefs depends on other justified beliefs. How do those other beliefs get justified? Maybe by yet further justified beliefs. Foundationalism is the thesis that there are basically justified beliefs -- beliefs that are justified in some other way than by being supported by other justified beliefs. If you're not a foundationalist, then you think that all justified beliefs are justified by other justified beliefs; for any given justified belief, there must be a chain of justified beliefs in successive support relationships that never ends, either because it continues infinitely, or because it doubles back on itself. Insofar as these latter two options are implausible forms of regress, there is intuitive support for foundationalism.

So as I understand it, what it is to be a foundationalist is to think that there are basic beliefs — i.e., beliefs that are justified, not in virtue of being supported by other justified beliefs. I'm surprised to see Williamson suggest that his view is a foundationalist one; E = K appears to me to be neutral on the question of whether there are basic beliefs. The Knowledge First project is consistent with the traditional idea that knowledge entails justified belief; I don't think it's a stretch to say that, on Williamson's view, knowledge is a (special, metaphysically privileged) kind of justified belief.

So if one's knowledge is among one's justified beliefs, then read literally, the claim that "[all of] one's knowledge serves as the basis of all one's justified beliefs" is tantamount to the claim that the chains of justification of the sort foundationalists talk about are in fact circular: some of my justified beliefs—the knowledgable ones, at least—are supported by chains that include themselves. But this is anathema to foundationalism, as the label for that view makes vivid.

Maybe I'm reading uncharitably literally; the thesis is that the knowledge is basic, and it supports the mere justified beliefs. All the knowledge is at the bottom of the pyramid and nowhere else. This now looks like foundationalism, but it carries the commitment that all knowledge is basic: all knowledgable beliefs are justified, not in virtue of being supported by other justified beliefs. This is a stronger claim than any I'd thought Williamson was committed to; I'm not sure it's particularly plausible. There is such a thing as inferential knowledge; in such cases, it seems very intuitive that justification depends on justification of the beliefs from which it's inferred. If you're a knowledge first program, you shouldn't think that's the main thing or the fundamental thing or the most interesting thing going on -- knowledge first people should be more excited about the fact that the knowledge of the conclusion flows from the knowledge of the premise -- but I see no reason to deny that there's also justificatory dependence at a less fundamental level. But foundationalism is (I thought) precisely about justificatory independence.

So what's going on? Does Williamson intend a weaker sense of 'foundationalism'? Or am I wrong about what the traditional sense would require, given his comments? Or is Williamson really committed to the thesis that if S knows that p, then S's justification for p does not depend on S's justification for any other proposition?

New draft paper on modals and modal epistemology

I've just completed a draft of a new paper on modals and modal epistemology, developing some of the ideas in my last few blog posts, and engaging with Timothy Williamson's discussion of counterfactuals and modal epistemology. Here's the abstract:

Modals and Modal Epistemology

Abstract. I distinguish (§§1-2) two projects in modal epistemology, and suggest (§3) that Timothy Williamson’s treatment of modal epistemology, relating truths of modality to counterfactual conditionals, is best understood as a way of addressing the mystery of why we should have developed cognitive access to facts of metaphysical modality. I offer (§4) a reconstruction of his argument, so interpreted. I compare Williamson’s counterfactual-based approach to metaphysical modality with a treatment in terms of quotidian modals (§§5-6), relating each to the dominant linguistic treatments of modals and conditionals (§§7-8). The insights offered by these linguistic treatments will emphasize the similarity of the counterfactual approach with the quotidian modals approach—in particular, they will demonstrate that the counterfactuals approach does not enjoy the advantage over the latter that Williamson claims for it. The ultimate lesson to be drawn (§9) is that there is a respect in which investigation into metaphysical modality is sui generis; but this is not a respect that renders modal epistemology implausibly mysterious.

The draft is online here. Comments are definitely very welcome -- feel free to email me, or leave a comment to this blog post, or get in touch with me in whatever other way seems like a good idea.

Williamson on modal epistemology and counterfactuals

This post is an exercise in Williamson exegesis. I'm looking primarily at chapter five -- the modal epistemology chapter -- of The Philosophy of Philosophy. (That chapter substantially overlaps a couple of earlier papers as well.) As many readers will know, Williamson emphasises the equivalence of claims of metaphysical modality with particular counterfactuals (such as the ones discussed in my recent post here), and suggests, therefore, that our ordinary imagination-based capacity for the evaluation of counterfactual conditionals brings along with it a capacity for knowledge of metaphysical modality. As Williamson says, "the epistemology of metaphysical thinking is tantamount to a special case of the epistemology of counterfactual thinking."

There are important interpretive questions that are too easily overlooked. The question I'm after right now is just: what in particular is Williamson trying to accomplish in this material? I think that many people are not always clear about this question. (Williamson is one of these people.)

One candidate project is to answer what I'll call the 'how' question:

How do we have modal knowledge?

A possible answer to the how question suggested by Williamson's work, which emphasizes the equivalence of modal claims with certain counterfactuals, is that we acquire modal knowledge by coming to have counterfactual knowledge, and exploiting the connection between counterfactual truths and modal truths. I think understanding Williamson's project in this way would be a mistake.

Counterfactuals and Modals

I like the approach to counterfactuals that treats them as modals. The sentence 'if A were the case, C would be the case' says that, out of some restricted class of possibilities, all the A possibilities are C possibilities. Which restricted class is in play is of course in part a context-sensitive matter. The relevant class of possibilities is relevant for other modal language, too. I've argued, controversially, that this is the case for 'knows'. But there are much less contentious cases, too. Consider bare modals like 'might' and 'must'; these definitely take context-sensitive domains, and those domains look to play central roles in the interpretation of counterfactual conditionals, too.

There is a kind of conflict between sentences like these, uttered back to back in a given conversational context:

(1) If he were to break thorough his chains, he would save the girl.

(2) He couldn't possibly break through his chains.

The 'kind of conflict' here isn't necessarily a matter of semantic inconsistency. (The approach to modals and counterfactuals I have in mind has the second entailing the first -- if there's no possibility of his breaking his chains, then, trivially, all possibilities in which he breaks through his chains are ones in which he kills his captors.) It's rather something like a pragmatic tension. The 'couldn't possibly' claim requires the modal base to be devoid of cases in which he breaks through his chains; such a base renders the counterfactual trivial -- so the counterfactual strongly prefers a context in which there are some chain-breaking possibilities among the modal base. (Compare: "There's nothing in this bottle." "All the air in the bottle is musty.")

Given this connection between bare modals and counterfactual conditionals, it's pretty straightforward to see that certain equivalences will hold as well. In particular, these two sentences will, in any given context, have the same truth value:

(3) He can't phi.

(4) If he were to phi, then p and not-p.

Could there be Reductive Knowledge First?

Timothy Williamson has famously defended these two claims:

(1) Knowledge cannot be analyzed

(2) Knowledge can play lots of important explanatory roles all over the place

These two claims, if true, give us reason to think about the role of knowledge very differently; use it to explain things, instead, of as something we're trying to explain. Call this project -- the one recommended in the previous sentence -- 'knowledge first.' The question I'm wondering about right now is, what is the relationship between (1) and knowledge first? Does the case for knowledge first depend on the case for (1)?

(Cards on the table: I'm a guy who thinks that (1) and (2) are both true and that knowledge first is a good idea. So I'm engaging now in a fairly academic question about what depends on what.)

Surely (1) and (2) are consistent (modulo possible worries about whether it's possible to analyze anything). 'Prime number' can be analyzed if anything can, but this is no obstacle to our using the notion of a prime number to explain various phenomena in the world -- for example, in theorizing about encryption algorithms.

Suppose (2) is true. The case for (2) would presumably consist largely of examples -- cases in which we got good explanatory payoff by invoking knowledge. That's the sort of thing that makes up the latter two thirds of Knowledge and Its Limits. And suppose (1) were unestablished, or even known to be false. Wouldn't (2) all by itself make a strong case for knowledge first?

Knowing the Intuition and Knowing the Counterfactual

Knowing the Intuition and Knowing the Counterfactual, (2009) Philosophical Studies, 145(3), September 2009: 435-443. Please refer to published version here. For a Philosophical Studies book symposium on Timothy Williamson's The Philosophy of Philosophy. See also Williamson's response here.

I criticize Timothy Williamson’s characterization of thought experiments on which the central judgments are judgments of contingent counterfactuals. The fragility of these counterfactuals makes them too easily false, and too difficult to know.

Thought-Experiment Intuitions and Truth in Fiction

Thought-Experiment Intuitions and Truth in Fiction, with Benjamin Jarvis. (2009) Philosophical Studies 142 (2), January 2009: 221-246. Please refer to published version, available online here.

What sorts of things are the intuitions generated via thought experiment? Timothy Williamson has responded to naturalistic skeptics by arguing that thought-experiment intuitions are judgments of ordinary counterfactuals. On this view, the intuition is naturalistically innocuous, but it has a contingent content and could be known at best a posteriori. We suggest an alternative to Williamson’s account, according to which we apprehend thought-experiment intuitions through our grasp on truth in fiction. On our view, intuitions like the Gettier intuition are necessarily true and knowable a priori. Our view, like Williamson’s, avoids naturalistic skepticism.